This chart, courtesy of Mike Smithson, shows Ipsos-Mori’s polling on British membership of the European Union. It shows support for leaving the EU is no higher now than it was 20 years ago. I’ll wager this surprises you.
As you can see, there has always been a constituency for leaving the EU. Public enthusiasm for the european project has always been conditional. Despite that, the unhappiness of a known known has generally proved more attractive than the uncertainty of a known unknown. (This, ahem, is also true of certain other constitutional questions with which we have wrestled recently.)
But how can this be? How can UKIP be soaring in the polls even as public support for their greatest proposal sags? Well and though newspapers and television struggle to reflect this, more than one thing can happen at once.
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